Ian H. from the U.K. won Roleplayers Chronicle‘s Prize Pack #4 at the conclusion of the month-long entry period that ended July 22, 2012. Tunse’al Setting Guide was part of the dozens of RPGs that comprised the package. Tunse’al is still several days away from being available for sale. The first download will go to Ian as part of the package.

Thanks to Roleplayers Chronicle for giving us the opportunity to participate in the debut indie RPG giveaway! We look forward to annual participation.

Vickey

I took a break from writing today to do some marketing prep. I’ve heard some decent things about VistaPrint and have been getting what seems like a zillion offers from them. So, I finally took them up on one to try a huge number of free products with a few paid items and upgrades thrown in for good measure. I didn’t have complete flexibility that way, but I think the preliminary results look sharp. We’ll see when the physical items arrive in a couple of weeks! In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek of the Tunse’al poster.

Have a great day!

Vickey

At long last, we’ve published the Tunse’al RPG Setting trailer.

Go to Roleplayers Chronicle to enter a contest where you could win the PDF before it’s even available for purchase!

As is the case in life more times than most of us probably would like, little bumps in the road can delay the journey you’re on. In our case, the journey to getting Tunse’al RPG launched has been delayed by more than two months. We’d planned to launch in April. Technically, we planned to launch in January, but a personal tragedy occurred the very next day from setting that date. So now, after redirecting to some more immediate, personal matters, we’re back on track!

Last night I ran another playtest, this time Part III of Caravan of Troubles, a Tunse’al supplement. An interesting thing when you don’t tell your friends that the setting they’ve been playing is your own creation? You get very candid feedback. And that’s one of the reasons we didn’t let them in on the deal immediately! I’ve run playtests with our gaming groups before. They are honest about their experiences. Sometimes brutally so. And when you can separate yourself from the feedback, that can be incredibly helpful. At the end of the night, one of our friends commented that he liked the system (I was running it in Savage Worlds, for which we hope to get a license) and he loved the setting. He thought it was really neat.

That did it! I couldn’t keep it a secret anymore. While one of our players already knew (hey, when you start mucking about with a binary star system with a planet orbiting the pair and having its own three-body satellite system, you take advantage of having friends who are literally astrophysicists!), the rest had been in the dark. So with the positive declrations came a surge of energy driving me on to get more done than I thought I could do in the number of hours available.

Check back in the next couple of days for our trailer with custom-created music, depictions of Tunse’al by very talented artists, and a nutshell of what the world of Tunse’al is. It’ll be ready. This time nothing’s going to stop me!

Vickey

We really thought we would have had our first product out last week, but that just wasn’t to be. We want to get the launch right. We’re not willing to settle for “good enough.” We want the Tunse’al RPG debut to be something we are proud of and don’t say to folks, “Well, we were in a hurry, so we rushed it to get it out.” Instead, we’re opting for the fashionably late approach. At least that’s how we hope those few who know we planned to be ready in April will see it. Luckily, we were only doing a “soft opening” leading up to April.

As I write, I’m taking a brief break from what really is the last major developing in the master guide for Tunse’al. That’s the document we work from to drive all related products: the Tunse’al RPG Setting Guide and supplements, regardless of game system used to play. Once that is finalized, the next hurdle is in line. That would be laying out the actual setting guide. Following that, we’ve got the Pinnacle Entertainment Group licensing process. We hope to be able to sell two versions of Tunse’al: systemless, so you can play with any rules system you feel like converting it to, and Savage Worlds, one of the most popular non-Dungeons and Dragons, non-D20 systems out there.

There are some minor things we still need to do in after that to make the products available. We’re already set up for DriveThruRPG.net, but we’ve got others we want to use, too. Before we launch for sales, we plan to run a contest to award the setting guide as a contest prize and get it in the hands of some reviewers.

Wish us luck!

We’re getting really close! We’re finalizing our Tunse’al Master Guide, the in-house document that drives everything we build for Tunse’al, the RPG. With that, we’ll also be able to finalize the setting guide and get that into layout.

Speaking of layout, while we’re still toying with the idea of page decorations, we have decided on the Tunse’al footer. Created from the script Svenja Liv designed for our Gelid race, a one-line image will show the page number at the bottom of the text.

We’ve also released a pre-launch supplement, A Cause to Die For, in Savage Insider, Issue 4: Shaking Things Up, a free, quarterly ezine for Savage Worlds. While we haven’t submitted our materials for licensing just yet, we took the opportunity to showcase how are systemless design can be used for Savage Worlds. All Tunse’al items are intended to be simultaneously released as systemless and Savage Worlds, if we are successful in our endeavor to become an Official Savage Worlds Licensee.

Our trailer and other marketing should be ready in the next week. After that, we’ll run a contest to win products before you can buy them. And then…THE LAUNCH!

We officially have all the art in that we commissioned for the Tunse’al RPG launch. We playtested a one-shot and the first segment of Caravan of Troubles, our debut supplement. We’ve got most of the text for both of those.

Now we have a re-recording for the trailer to do, finalize some stuff to talk to the accountant about tomorrow, finish making decisions on some background information, work on mechanics guides for the systemless setting, fine-tune some items for Savage Worlds mechanics, lay-out the setting guide, and present it to Pinnacle Entertainment Group for licensing consideration and to e23 for admission into their shop.

Then there are the other things we have to do that are all shapes and sizes and too numerous to bore you with!

We have just under two months before we go live with products to sell. We’re excited about the pace of progress. We have an account with One Book Shelf, the people behind DriveThruRPG and its sister sites. We have only the contract to sign for Paizo, and we’re looking into Steve Jackson Games’ e23.

Our pool of freelance artists continues to amaze and inspire us with their creativity and interpretations. To provide a reference for the other artists, Joshua Pinkas provided a head shot of some of the races of Tunse’al. Here’s a preview into what the Kresh, an amphibious humanoid race of warriors, looks like.